Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace

By Noam Chomsky

The renowned activist examines the brutal reality of America’s Cold War era foreign policy across Central America—with a new preface by the author.

First published in 1986, Turning the Tide presents Noam Chomsky’s expert analysis of three interrelated questions: What was the aim and impact of the US Central American policy? What factors in US society supported and opposed that policy? And how can concerned citizens affect future policy?

Chomsky demonstrates how US Central American policies implemented broader US economic, military, and social aims—while claiming a supposedly positive impact on the lives of people in Central America. A particularly revealing focus of Chomsky's argument is the world of US academia and media, which Chomsky analyzes in detail to explain why the US public is so misinformed about our government's policies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781608464470

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928 and studied at the university of Pennsylvania. Known as one of the principal founders of transformational-generative grammar, he later emerged as a critic of American politics. He wrote and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues. He is now a Professor of Linguistics at MIT, and the author of over 150 books.

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Preface to the 2015 Edition

Terror and Unterror

The title of this book was suggested by a friend who is familiar with my work and knew that I was much involved in US-Latin America relations, the threat of nuclear war, and the impact on the society of the early stages of the neoliberal assault on the population that was beginning in the late 1970s and took off under Reagan—and thought it would be a good idea to emphasize the hopes for positive change. I agreed. Hence the title and the final sections of the first edition, which ended with chapter 5.

Rereading, I wouldn’t change what is written there, apart from updating. The message of hope still seems to me correct. But the world makes its own demands, and it seemed to me that a realistic picture was grim.

At the time, human rights organizations, with good reason, referred to the Reagan administration as an apologist for some of the worst horrors of our time (46), while providing a detailed accounting of those horrors and the crucial US role in supporting and directing them.

Like many of the crimes of the shameful Reagan era, the Central American horrors began in the late Carter years, then escalating sharply under Reaganite brutality. The first major massacre of peasants, at Rio Sumpul, took place in May 1980 (145). It was noteworthy not only because of the scale and character of the atrocities and the media avoidance, but also because it was a joint operation of two terrorist armies supported by Washington, the armies of Honduras and El Salvador, two states with generally hostile relations, even having fought a bitter war a decade earlier. The circumstances suggest that US coordination might have been involved, but lacking any inquiry, that remains speculation.

One obvious place to investigate the atrocities of the Salvadoran army and its paramilitary associates was the border areas, where tens of thousands of peasants, mostly women and children, had fled from government terror. Unlike the sites of the massacres themselves, these areas were easily accessible. Journalists avoided them, but they were visited by a congressional delegation led by representative Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, who provided a detailed and grisly record of refugee testimony. It was virtually ignored in the United States, apart from a report in a small weekly in Studds’s home district.1

Most of the text that follows reviews the gruesome record of Reaganite state terrorism in Central America and its antecedents. The postscript carries the discussion forward a year. There are crucial omissions. One is the Middle East. The year this book was published, 1985, Mideast/Mediterranean terrorism was selected by editors as the lead story of 1985 in an AP poll.

The choice made sense. The region did witness extreme acts of terrorism in 1985. The worst single terrorist act was a truck bomb in Lebanon, placed at the exit of a mosque and timed to go off when people were leaving. The target was Lebanon’s leading Shi’ite cleric, Sheikh Fadlallah, who escaped. But eighty others were killed by the massive explosion, mostly women and girls, even babies burned in their beds. The bombing was organized by the CIA and carried out with the help of Saudi and British clients. It was specifically authorized by CIA director William Casey according to correspondent Bob Woodward.

The worst terrorist atrocity of the year, however, is excluded from the canon by the familiar fallacy of wrong agency, and by the need to secure the principle enunciated by terrorism scholar Walter Laqueur that terrorism occurs almost exclusively in democratic or relatively democratic societies.

What is needed is a new concept, unterror, modelled on Orwell’s unpeople, referring to terror carried out by people against unpeople.

A second candidate for the AP award was Israel’s terrorist atrocities in southern Lebanon, the Iron Fist operations directed against what the Israeli military called terrorist villagers resisting Israel’s crimes in the region that it occupied in violation of Security Council orders. Shimon Peres’s terrorism reached new depths of calculated brutality and arbitrary murder, in the words of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, amply supported by direct coverage.

A third candidate was Israel’s bombing of Tunis, without any credible pretext as virtually conceded, killing 75 Tunisians and Palestinians, expedited by Washington and praised by Secretary of State George Shultz, though he preferred silence after the UN Security Council unanimously condemned the crime as an act of armed aggression (US abstaining).

These major crimes of US-backed state terrorism (if not the much worse crime of aggression) are also excluded from the canon as mere unterror, hence unworthy of mention or memory.

There were two acts of authentic terror that account for the judgment of the editors, in each case with one death, an American.

One of these cases has become very famous, the brutal murder of the crippled American Jew Leon Klinghoffer on the cruise ship Achille Lauro, hijacked in reaction to the Tunis bombing. The murder seemed to set a standard for remorselessness among terrorists, senior New York Times correspondent John Burns wrote, capturing the general horror at a truly despicable crime.

No such standard is set by many similar cases, however; for example, when British reporters found the flattened remains of a wheelchair in the remnants of the Jenin refugee camp after Ariel Sharon’s spring 2002 offensive. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon, they reported: In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag held by a crippled Palestinian, Kemal Zughayer, who was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when [a friend] found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.

Another act of unterror, which does not to enter the annals of terrorism along with Leon Klinghoffer. His murder was not under the command of a monster, but rather a man of peace as he was called by the man of vision in the White House.

All of this and much more is omitted in the text below, though the most horrifying events occurred during the time frame covered here.2 Also omitted are Reaganite crimes in those years in southern Africa and Southeast Asia. But even this partial record is grim enough.

The same is true of the ways the ongoing events have been interpreted within the ideological system. What can one say, for example, when the national press, considered liberal, praises Reagan for emphasizing that we must contain Nicaragua and fit Nicaragua back into a Central American mode meeting the regional standard—the mode and standard of murderous terror states that are slaughtering their populations, imposing starvation and misery for the benefit of a highly privileged few, engaging in unspeakable torture, and on and on in accord with the dictates of the ruler of the region?

What can one say when a distinguished educational statesman, as his biography calls him, adviser to three presidents and recognized for his liberal and humane views, tells us that We breathed in relief when forces favoring democracy restored Guatemala to its normal place in the American family of nations (224) by ending the brief democratic interlude and turning Guatemala into the worst hellhole of the suffering region? Or when the most highly respected liberal columnists praise the US invasion of Vietnam as based on the guiding principle of American foreign policy since 1945: that no state shall use military force or the threat of military force to achieve its political objectives. And orate that America is fighting the war in defense of the deepest conviction of Western civilization,…that the individual belongs not to the state but to his Creator. And that the United States has always been trying to do good, encourage political liberty, and promote social justice in the Third World, particularly in Latin America, where we have traditionally been a friend and protector (124-233).

It is almost a breath of fresh air to turn to the venerable standard bearer of American liberalism, the New Republic and learn from the editors that we must provide military aid to "Latin-style fascists…regardless of how many are murdered because there are higher American priorities than Salvadoran human rights (human rights meaning…the physical security of persons who may or may not be suspected of potential anti-oligarchical sympathies" (234, my italics).

Regardless of how many are murdered, may or may not be suspected of potential opposition to the Latin-style fascists of the oligarchies that we must support regardless of how many they murder. Words fail.

It is a real relief to remember that over two-thirds of Americans regarded the Vietnam war as fundamentally wrong and immoral, not merely a mistake—the latter, the outer limits of respectable opinion across the spectrum. And that popular struggle has achieved a great deal despite the enormous barriers erected by the powerful and their acolytes.

Introduction

We live entangled in webs of endless deceit, often self-deceit, but with a little honest effort, it is possible to extricate ourselves from them. If we do, we will see a world that is rather different from the one presented to us by a remarkably effective ideological system, a world that is much uglier, often horrifying. We will also learn that our own actions, or passive acquiescence, contribute quite substantially to misery and oppression, and perhaps eventual global destruction.

But there is a brighter side. We are fortunate to live in a society that is not only rich and powerful—and hence, as any student of history would expect, dangerous and destructive—but also relatively free and open, perhaps more so than any other, though this may change if the reactionary jingoists who have misappropriated the term conservative succeed in their current project of diminishing civil liberties, strengthening the power of the state, and protecting it from public scrutiny. For those who are relatively wealthy and privileged, a very large sector of a society as rich as ours, there are ample opportunities to discover the truth about who we are and what we do in the world. Furthermore, by international standards the state is limited at home in its capacity to coerce. Hence those who enjoy a measure of wealth and privilege are free to act in many ways, without undue fear of state terror, to bring about crucial changes in policy and even more fundamental institutional changes. We are fortunate, perhaps uniquely so, in the range of opportunities we enjoy for free inquiry and effective action. The significance of these facts can hardly be exaggerated.

I want to consider here some aspects of the reality that is often concealed or deformed by the reigning doctrinal system, which pervades the media, journals of opinion, and much of scholarship.1 An honest inquiry will reveal that striking and systematic features of our international behavior are suppressed, ignored, or denied. It will reveal further that our role in perpetuating misery and oppression, even barbaric torture and mass slaughter, is not only significant in scale, but is also a predictable and systematic consequence of longstanding geopolitical conceptions and institutional structures. There is no way to give a precise measure of the scale of our responsibility in each particular case, but whether we conclude that our share is 90%, or 40%, or 2%, it is that factor that should primarily concern us, since it is that factor that we can directly influence. It is cheap and easy to deplore the other fellow’s crimes in the manner of the official peace movements of the so-called Communist states, or their counterparts in the West who, with comparable sincerity, denounce the crimes of official enemies while dismissing or justifying our own. An honest person will choose a different course.

These are among the questions I want to examine here, concentrating primarily on relations between the US and its southern neighbors—and victims—in the post-World War II period, although the pattern that emerges is by no means new and is not limited to this region.2

Chapter 1 is concerned with the grim reality of normal life for a large majority of the population in our dependencies in Central America, and with the consequences that regularly ensue, at our initiative and with our crucial support, when efforts are undertaken to bring about constructive change. In chapter 2, I will turn to the backgrounds for US policy and the geopolitical conceptions that guide planners, as exhibited in the documentary record and, more significantly, in the actual pattern of events. Chapter 3 places these matters in the broader context of US history, both in Central America and elsewhere, and discusses recent US policies in Central America in this context. In chapter 4, I will turn to national security policy, the Cold War system of global management, and the drift towards global war which is, in significant measure, a result of US government programs that have little to do with security, but are deeply rooted in the structure of power in our society and the global concerns of dominant institutions. Finally in the last chapter, I want to consider the domestic scene: the dedicated efforts that have been undertaken by dominant elites to overcome the democratic revival of the 1960s, and the opportunities that now exist to engage in constructive work to deter terrible crimes, to reverse the race towards global destruction, and to enlarge the sphere of freedom and justice.

The first five chapters constitute the first edition of this book, which went to press in November 1985. The final chapter is a post­ script, added in December 1986.

1

Free World Vignettes

John Jay, the President of the Continental Congress and the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, held that the people who own the country ought to govern it.1 His prescription is, in fact, close to the reality. The United States is furthermore unusual in the high degree of class consciousness among the business classes, the extremely low degree of class consciousness (particularly in the current period) on the part of workers, and the general conformity of the intelligentsia. Since World War II, the United States has held a position of dominance in world affairs with few if any historical parallels, though long before, it had become the greatest industrial power by a large margin. US elites were naturally aware of these conditions and determined to exploit the expanded opportunities they offered. They have engaged in careful planning, and have been willing to resort to subversion and violence on an impressive scale to maintain or extend their dominant position, which, according to the reigning doctrinal system, is theirs by right, given the unique virtue of the state that they or their representatives govern.

There are aspects of American history and institutions that lend support to the pretensions of ideologues, but the full story is less pleasant to contemplate, as many have recognized over the years. The founder of the utopian Oneida community, John Humphrey Noyes, described the US in 1830 as a bloated, swaggering libertine...with one hand whipping a negro tied to a liberty-pole, and with another dashing an emaciated Indian to the ground.2 At the turn of the century, as his compatriots turned from slaughtering Indians to wiping out resisting niggers in the Philippines, Mark Twain gave his version of The Battle Hymn of the Republic:3

Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword

He is searching out the hoardings where the strangers’ wealth is stored

He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored.

His lust is marching on.

If some Third World revolution today were to reenact US history, with literal human slavery as well as decimation and brutal expulsion of the native population, the reaction would be one of horror and disbelief. We may recall, for example, that the first emancipation proclamation was issued by the British governor of Virginia in 1775, and that slavery was abolished in 1821 in Central America by nations to whom we must teach lessons in civilization, according to Theodore Roosevelt and other interventionists until the present day.4 The conquest of the national territory and the exercise of US power in large areas of the world also hardly merit the accolades of the faithful.

No region of the world has been more subject to US influence over a long period than Central America and the Caribbean. The extent and character of US influence are illustrated, for example, by the establishment early in the century of a National Bank of Nicaragua in which the New York Brown Brothers Bank held majority ownership; its board of directors met in New York and consisted entirely of Brown Brothers’ US representatives, except for a token Nicaraguan while US banks received the revenues of the national rail and steamship lines and a US-run commission required Nicaragua to pay fraudulent damage claims that exceeded total US investment in the country for alleged damages from civil disorder. Or to take another case, a coup attempt in Honduras in 1923 by a local client of the United Fruit company (which virtually owned the country) led to US military intervention and a settlement arranged by the State Department: North American power had become so encompassing that U.S. military forces and United Fruit could struggle against each other to see who was to control the Honduran government, then have the argument settled by the U.S. Department of State. The United Fruit client took power in 1932 and hand-in-hand with United Fruit ruled his country for the next seventeen years.5 Throughout modern history, much the same has been true.

We naturally look to the Central America-Caribbean region, then, if we want to learn something about ourselves, just as we look to Eastern Europe or the internal empire if want to learn about the Soviet Union. The picture we see is not a pretty one. The region is one of the world’s most awful horror chambers, with widespread starvation, semi-slave labor, torture and massacre by US clients. Virtually every attempt to bring about some constructive change has been met with a new dose of US violence, even when initiated by Church-based self-help groups or political figures who modelled themselves on Roosevelt’s New Deal. We are, once again, living in such a period, in fact, the worst such period, which is saying a good deal.6

The region evokes little attention inside the United States as long as discipline reigns. The prevailing unconcern is revealed, for example, by the treatment of Woodrow Wilson’s bloody counterinsurgency campaign in the Dominican Republic—or lack thereof; it received its first detailed scholarly examination after 60 years.7 Or consider the case of William Krehm, Time correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean in the 1940s. His book on the region—a rare event in itself—was published in Mexico in 1948 and then elsewhere in Latin America; the original English version appeared 36 years later.8 The book jacket states that Time refused to publish much of what he submitted for fear of offending large corporations, and that his book was regarded as too controversial by American publishers. Lack of interest, the consequence of lack of credible threats to US control at the time, might well suffice to explain its unavailability. The two books just cited appeared in 1984, a time of challenge to US dominance, hence much concern over the fate of the region. Our lack of interest when the lower orders make no unseemly noises should be a matter of no great pride.

The brutal and corrupt Somoza dictatorship had long been a reliable US ally and a base for the projection of US power: to terminate Guatemalan democracy in 1954, to attack Cuba in 1961, to avert the threat of democracy in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and in El Salvador in 1972.9 The fall of the dictatorship in 1979, along with a renewed threat to the military regime in Guatemala and the growth of popular organizations in El Salvador, led to increasing US intervention and brought the region to the front pages. Let us consider the picture that comes into focus with this renewed attention.

1 The Miseries of Traditional Life

Among the many dedicated and honorable Americans who went to see for themselves, one of the most impressive is Charles Clements, a graduate of the US Air Force Academy and former pilot in Vietnam, who was sent to a psychiatric hospital when he refused to fly further missions. A committed pacifist, he went to El Salvador in March 1982 and spent a year as the only trained physician in the rebel-controlled Guazapa region 25 miles from San Salvador, a free-fire zone in which any person or object is a legitimate target. There he witnessed the terror of the US-run war against rural El Salvador at first hand, living with the campesinos, many of [whom] have been tortured and mutilated by tormenters who have been trained in the sophisticated tactics of violence—often by our own military advisers, in the words of Murat Williams, US Ambassador to El Salvador from 1961 to 1964, when the system of efficient state terror was established by the Kennedy Administration.

Clements observed the attacks on villages by planes and helicopter gunships and artillery, the strafing by US-supplied jets aimed specifically against defenseless peasants, the ruins of villages gutted by government forces, the destruction of crops and livestock to ensure starvation, always imminent. As is the regular pattern, the worst atrocities were carried out by US-trained elite battalions (Atlacatl, Ramón Belloso) and by air and artillery units employing tactics designed by the US in Vietnam and taught by US advisers. He treated the bodies mutilated by torture and the victims of attacks with napalm and gasoline bombs and white phosphorus rockets used as anti-personnel weapons against civilians. He heard the stories of people whose families had been hacked to death by National Guardsmen or who had crawled from under a pile of bodies of trapped civilians cut to pieces with machetes and mutilated by US-trained troops, or who had themselves been subjected to horrifying torture receiving no medical aid, since physicians were unwilling to endanger their lives by treating someone who had been tortured by the security forces. Using a US-made scanner, he could hear the voices of American advisers directing troops on their mass murder missions.

He also witnessed the courage of the campesinos, their sense of community and hope, their schools and rudimentary health services and community programs in the base Christian communities-a revelation to people who had lived for a century as virtual slaves, ever since the oligarchy had taken over most of the land by a combination of legal chicanery and violence to enjoy the profits of the coffee boom—and their determination to build their new society even while the Salvadoran government sought to destroy them.10

But what seems to have impressed him the most were the words of a lay minister of one of the base Christian communities:

You gringos are always worried about violence done with machine guns and machetes. But there is another kind of violence that you must be aware of, too. I used to work on the hacienda. My job was to take care of the dueno’s dogs. I gave them meat and bowls of milk, food that I couldn’t give my own family. When the dogs were sick, I took them to the veterinarian in Suchitoto or San Salvador. When my children were sick, the dueno gave me his sympathy, but no medicine as they died.

To watch your children die of sickness and hunger while you can do nothing is a violence to the spirit. We have suffered that silently for too many years. Why aren’t you gringos concerned about that kind of violence?

The old man was wrong. We gringos are not worried about violence done with machine guns and machetes. Rather, we devote our incomparable wealth and power to ensuring that such violence proceeds unhindered, and we laud its successes, joined by the suppliers of French tanks, Israeli guns and planes and napalm, German, Swiss and Belgian weapons, and other civilized people whose outrage knows no bounds when the lower orders threaten to break their bonds, but who are otherwise content to look the other way. But his comment is nevertheless to the point. The violence of everyday life in the domains of our influence and control is not deemed a fit topic of attention or concern except at moments when order is threatened.

A vignette of normal life is given by US journalist Tom Buckley, who visited a coffee plantation in El Salvador in 1981.11 Most of the workers and their families lived in a long one-story building, with a room about 10 feet square for each family of 2 adults and many children, and privies 50 feet down the hill. Some of the new showcase ranchitos were a bit larger:

As residences for agricultural labor go in El Salvador, they were not bad, but the furnishings were mean and sparse, and the atmosphere was one of hopelessness and squalor.

An old woman sat in front of one of the ranchitos. Her left ankle and leg were bandaged with rags halfway to the knee. She said she thought her ankle might be broken. Hernandez [the manager, who ran the plantation for absentee landlords in Florida] asked her if she had been to see the paramedic. She hadn’t, she said. She was unable to hobble to the clinic, and he, it seemed, did not make house calls. A younger woman sat in a hammock in front of another ranchito. At her side was a cradle improvised out of a basket. An infant lay in it, motionless. Its belly was bloated, and its limbs and face were so thin that the skin was translucent. Hernandez asked what was wrong. It is his stomach, the woman said. The food does him no good. She said that she had taken the infant to a physician but that he had told her nothing could be done. Her voice was vague and monotonous, as though speaking taxed her energy unbearably.

I don’t think she took him at all, Hernandez said when we had returned to the station wagon. It may sound terrible to say, but having children die is so common that it is accepted. It’s no big thing to these people.

Hernandez’s point is reiterated by Jeane Kirkpatrick, chief sadist-in-residence of the Reagan Administration, on the basis of her vast experience with peasant life in the Third World:12

Traditional autocrats [the ones we do and should support, Kirkpatrick explains] leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill.

Kirkpatrick adds further that Such societies create no refugees: only 20% of the population of the Caribbean who have come to the United States, many illegally, to escape grinding poverty and oppression (40% from Puerto Rico where access is easier), including 40,000 from Haiti since 1979, many of them boat people whom the Carter Administration attempted to force back to the misery from which they fled with full regard to the Administration policy of human rights, so its spokesman assured us—not to speak of a huge flow of refugees from the terror-and-torture states established since the 1960s with US backing, including some 20% of the population of Uruguay, well over 100,000 victims of Somoza’s terror by 1978, 140,000 boat people fleeing the Philippines to Sabah in the mid-1970s, and on, and on; and the even greater numbers of internal refugees fleeing state terror or herded into secure areas by the state terrorists.13 This vast flood of refugees furthermore increased dramatically as a direct consequence of the policies to which Kirkpatrick was to make a notable contribution soon after having delivered herself of these pronouncements, which much impressed Reagan’s staff. In El Salvador, approximately one quarter of all Salvadorans have fled [or have been forcibly expelled] from their homes, including many who flee in terror to the United States, where US authorities seek to return them to privation, torture and assassination. In 1984, only 93 Salvadorans and no Guatemalans, of the 1 million who had fled these countries, were legally admitted to the US as refugees; only 1% of Guatemalans and 3% of Salvadorans were granted asylum as compared with 52% of Bulgarians and 51% of Russians, countries where the miseries of ordinary life, or the very threat to existence, do not begin to compare with what is endured in these long-term beneficiaries of US solicitude.14

The picture described by the lay minister in El Salvador or by Tom Buckley can be duplicated in large parts of the world. The habitual patterns are captured by a character in lgnazio Silone’s rendition of peasant life in southern Italy in his classic Fontamara, describing the hierarchy of traditional life:

At the head of everything is God, the Lord of Heaven.

Everyone knows that.

Then comes Prince Torlonia, lord of the earth.

Then come Prince Torlonia’s guards.

Then come Prince Torlonia’s guards’ dogs.

Then, nothing at all.

Then, nothing at all.

Then, nothing at all.

Then come the peasants. And that’s all.

Adapting the picture to our domains, it is only necessary to insert the United States, a shade removed from the Lord of Heaven and doing His holy work, as our leaders have often told us.

2 Challenge and Response: Nicaragua

What Buckley saw is the kind of society that we have helped to create and sustain through a century of intervention, and that we are now attempting to secure or restore. Sometimes, these habitual patterns are threatened, as today in Nicaragua, where the priorities of the Sandinista government meant that Nicaragua’s poor majority would have access to, and be the primary beneficiaries of, public programs in accordance with the logic of the majority, a concept which implies redistribution of access to wealth and public services to the benefit of the poor majority, and support for mass organizations that involve very large numbers of people in the decisions that affect their lives.15 At such moments, normal life undergoes some changes: two kinds of change, in fact. Let us look further into each of these.

One kind of change is illustrated in a report by Jethro Pettit, Desk officer for Latin America of Oxfam America:16

Before the revolution we didn’t participate in anything. We only learned to make tortillas and cook beans and do what our husbands told us. In only five years we have seen a lot of changes—and we’re still working on it!

Esmilda Flores belongs to an agricultural cooperative in the mountains north of Esteli, Nicaragua. Together with seven other women and 15 men, she works land that was formerly a coffee plantation owned by an absentee landlord.

After the revolution in 1979, the families who had worked the land became its owners. They have expanded production to include corn, beans, potatoes, cabbages, and dairy cows.

Before, we had to rent a small plot to grow any food, Flores said. And we had to pay one-half of our crop to the landlord! Now we work just as hard as before—both in the fields and at home—but there’s a difference, because we’re working for ourselves.

Women in Nicaragua, as in most of rural Latin America, carry an enormous workload, [as throughout the Third World]. Not only are they a mainstay of the agricultural labor force (40 percent of Nicaragua’s farm laborers are women), but they are responsible for child care, food preparation, and most domestic chores.

Women’s roles did not suddenly change with the revolution. But there has been a pronounced shift in cultural attitudes as a result of their strong participation in Nicaragua’s social reconstruction. Women have taken the lead in adult literacy programs, both as students and teachers. They have assumed key roles in rural health promotion and in vaccination campaigns...

Pettit goes on to describe the new rural organizations that aim to improve living and working conditions for farm laborers, offer training, technical advice, credit, seeds and tools, and so on. Clements reports similar developments in the rebel-held area of El Salvador where he worked, as have many others, though rarely in the US press.17

But these are not the only consequences that ensue when the pack animals who endure traditional life fail to appreciate properly that its miseries are quite bearable in Washington. Here is an example of a different kind of change, reported by a mother of two from Estell, near Esmilda Flores’s cooperative:18

Five of them raped me at about five in the evening...they had gang-raped me every day. When my vagina couldn’t take it anymore, they raped me through my rectum. I calculate that in 5 days they raped me 60 times.

The freedom fighters dispatched from Washington also beat her husband and gouged out the eyes of another civilian before killing him, as she watched.

Another witness describes a contra attack on his cooperative in April 1984:

They had already destroyed all that was the cooperative; a coffee drying machine, the two dormitories for the coffee cutters, the electricity generators, 7 cows, the plant, the food warehouse. There was one boy about 15 years old, who was retarded and suffered from epilepsy. We had left him in a bomb shelter. When we returned..., we saw...that they had cut his throat, then they cut open his stomach and left his intestines hanging out on the ground like a string. They did the same to Juan Corrales who had already died from a bullet in the fighting. They opened him up and took out his intestines and cut off his testicles.

In Miami—along with Washington, the base for the war against Nicaragua and one of the major world centers of international terrorism—Adolfo Calero, political-military director of the central component of the US proxy army (the FDN), stated that There is no line at all, not even a fine line, between a civilian farm owned by the government and a Sandinista military outpost—so that arbitrary killing of civilians is entirely legitimate. Calero is regarded as a meritorious figure and leading democrat by our domestic partisans of mass slaughter, mutilation, torture and degradation.19

A mother describes how her husband, a lay pastor, and her five children were kidnapped; when she found them the next day, They were left all cut up. Their ears were pulled off, their throats were cut, their noses and other parts were cut off. An American parish priest reports that in this region of three towns and scattered mountain communities, contra attacks have caused hundreds of deaths and thousands of displaced people, including many taken to Honduras. A Miskito teacher kidnapped by the contras describes the tortures to which he and eight others were subjected in Honduras, where US authorities can pretend no ignorance about their agents:

In the evening, they tied me up in the water from 7 PM until 1 AM. The next day, at 7 AM they began to make me collect garbage in the creek in my underwear, with the cold. The creek was really icey. I was in the creek for four hours...Then they threw me on the ant hill. Tied up, they put me chest-down on the ant hill. The ants bit my body. I squirmed to try to get them off my body, but there were too many...They would beat me from head to heels. They would give me an injection to calm me a little. Then they would beat me again.

A French priest who trains nurses in the north testified before the World Court about a handicapped person murdered for the fun of it, of women raped, of a body found with the eyes gouged out and a girl of 15 who had been forced into prostitution at a contra camp in Honduras. He accused the contras of creating an atmosphere of terror through kidnappings, rapes, murder and torture.20

These matters are considered of scant interest by US journalists in Nicaragua or Honduras, who do not seek out or publish such testimony, though it is permissible to concede that some unpleasant things may have happened in the past while reporting that the contras now vow to end rights abuses...after reports that the insurgents in Nicaragua have been executing Government soldiers, officials and village militiamen—not exactly the content of the testimony that has largely been suppressed in the field. The same news item informs us that the contra official placed in charge of human rights with much fanfare said that he had found only six ‘small cases’ of violations so far and suggested that some apparent violations had been the work of Government soldiers dressed as guerrillas. Contra political spokesman Arturo Cruz said that it was ‘a delicate thing’ to persuade rebel fighters to respect the lives of prisoners and pro-Sandinista civilians without demoralizing the fighters,21 offering an interesting insight into the democratic resistance that he seeks to legitimate and that is lauded by respected figures in the United States (see note 19).

The foreign press has been less circumspect. There we can read of "the contras’ litany of destruction": the destruction of health and community centers, cooperatives, kindergartens and schools with such methods as these, described by one of the survivors:22

Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes poked out. They were killed by slitting their throats, and pulling the tongue out through the slit.

And we can learn of a 14-year-old girl who was gang-raped and then decapitated, her head placed on a stake at the entrance to her village as a warning to government supporters; of nurses who were raped, then murdered; a man killed by hanging after his eyes were gouged out and his fingernails pulled out; a man who was stabbed to death after having been beaten, his eyes gouged out and a cross carved in his back after he fled from a hospital attacked by the contras; another tortured then skinned; another cut to pieces with bayonets by contras who then beheaded her 11-month-old baby before his wife’s eyes; others who were raped to a background of religious music; children shot in the back or repeatedly shot as though she had been used for target practice, according to a North American priest; along with much similar testimony provided by American priests, nuns, and others working in the border areas where the terrorist forces rampage, attacking from the Honduran bases established by their US advisers, instructors and paymasters.23

The chairmen of Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch, after a personal visit to study the great divergence between President Reagan’s rhetoric and the conclusions of the [Americas Watch] report on contra atrocities, concluded that "there can be no doubt, on the basis of what we heard and saw, that a planned strategy of terrorism is being carried out by the contras along the Honduras border and that the U.S. cannot avoid responsibility for these atrocities."24 Nor can the US apologists for the democratic resistance or those who front for it.

This is a brief sample of the methods we are compelled to undertake when the orderly regime of traditional life is challenged in our dependencies. They constitute what the press describes as a military and economic annoyance to the Sandinista regime, and since it does not appear likely to achieve the aim of overthrowing this regime, this annoyance is often considered unwise.25 Our chosen instruments for such annoyance are blandly described as the democratic opposition in the news columns of the nation’s press, for example, in a lengthy account of US government preparations for invasion of Nicaragua in the New York Times.26 In keeping with the principle of objectivity, no intimation is given that there might be something questionable about the contemplated crime of aggression, for which people were hanged at Nuremberg and Tokyo, nor could the Times editors express or even consider this point. But reference to the butchers as the democratic opposition in news columns is in keeping with the requirements of objectivity.

A more accurate description is that The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge.27

Our friends are quite aware of what they do. Arturo Cruz, who has been dubbed the leading Nicaragua democrat by the US media, concedes that his contra associates have committed damnable atrocities against civilians. Before joining them, he warned that their victory might lead to a possible mass execution of the flower of our youth while describing some of them as civic cadavers and noting that most of those persons in positions of military authority within the FDN are ex-members of the National Guard, who unconditionally supported Somoza until the end, against the will of the Nicaraguan people—not most, but virtually all, from the top military commander on down; Edgar Chamorro, chosen by the CIA to serve as spokesman for its proxy army, writes that "by mid-1984, 46 out of 48 of the contra commandantes were former National Guardsmen." Cruz is unhappy about the fact that the contras are almost totally controlled by right-wingers, many of them followers of Somoza, Dennis Volman reports. The new unified command (UNO) set up by the CIA is dominated by Adolfo Calero, according to all sources interviewed; Mr. Calero is an ultra-conservative Nicaraguan businessman closely allied to those FDN field commanders who were top officers in Somoza’s army. Volman reports further that Cruz is also "very concerned about alleged human rights abuses by contra forces in Nicaragua; as Cruz knows, the damnable atrocities are not merely alleged" and will continue in the course of a war waged by a mercenary army lacking any program other than restoration of the traditional order. While fronting for the terrorists attacking Nicaragua from Honduran bases, Cruz proclaims in the New York Times that the Sandinistas will also, in time, provoke conflicts with their neighbors in order to justify ever more repressive measures at home; in his view, Constable reports, the central issue is the ‘mistrust’ they have aroused among Central American leaders.28

We return to Cruz’s democratic credentials and his claim that he was excluded from the 1984 election—while secretly on the CIA payroll.

Edgar Chamorro writes that since 1982, the war has left more than 12,000 Nicaraguans dead, 50,000 wounded and 300,000 homeless. The figure of 12,000 dead was also given by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, including civilians and fighters on both sides. In an affidavit to the World Court given little notice in the press, Chamorro said that contras "would arrive at an undefended village, assemble all the residents in the town square and then proceed to kill—in full view of the others—all persons working for the